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Interview: Director Joe Swanberg – Drinking Buddies

When Joe Swanberg isn’t being terrorized by a group of masked men in this summer’s horror hit You’re Next, he’s busy writing and directing his own films. His latest feature, Drinking Buddies, is story that involves relationships, friendships, work, and a lot beer. I sat with Joe – in a brewery of all places – and talked about his film and his thoughts on men, women, and friendships.

Drinking Buddies opens up the conversation of whether males and females can be platonic friends.

Joe Swanberg: I do feel like it’s possible. I think that it’s complicated and the older you get, the more complicated it becomes. When you start to get into serious relationships, I understand how those jealousies happen. I also understand how it becomes very easy to cross the line, especially emotionally. You get invested in other people’s lives and that can be distracting you from your own relationship. It’s easiest when two people acknowledge the sexual attraction, and then overcome that. I think it’s trickier when people are in denial or one person is unaware of it and the other one feels it. You have to be on level footing. Men and women can be great friends if they’re able to overcome some of that stuff. I think it will be something everybody struggles with their whole life. I don’t think it’s easy.

The other subject your movie touches on is the relationships we have with the people you work with. In some cases, you end seeing them more than you see your own family.

You often spend more time with people you work with than the person you’re in a relationship with. It’s a complicated environment. With your co-workers, you have common friends and enemies. It all becomes very easy to be on the same page. Typically you see each other five days a week for a lot time.

Was this story inspired by something that happened to you?

Jake [Johnson] and Anna’s [Kendrick] characters are very much based on and modeled after my wife and I in a period in our relationship before we got married. Olivia’s [Wilde] character, not her plot but the character and her job, is modeled after my friend Kate who works at a brewery in Chicago. I wanted to create a central character who was a woman in a guy’s world – the challenge of being one of the guys but still being a woman.

One of my favorite scenes was the back-and-forth between the two couples when they were away at the beach house. It highlighted how different the two couples were.

I think that happens quick and it’s often easy to not notice when you’re drifting apart from somebody that you’re with. You suddenly find this big gulf existing between you emotionally. That scene was really fun to play with. One of the things I like about it is there’s no easy heroes or villains in that scenario. Everybody’s having their own complicated thing going on. In my life, that’s been my experience. There aren’t good guys and bad guys. Somebody who does something bad turns around and does something great. Somebody who is known to be a nice person also has the capabilities to hurt somebody. I really tried to exist in that gray area where things are complicated and there’s always something else beneath the surface.

You also stayed away from giving any relationships history on the four main characters.

I feel like the power of movies is to dive in. It’s one of the hard lessons to learn as a filmmaker because there’s a natural desire to want to explain everything. I forget the audience has seen a lot of movies so it’s very easy for them to follow along with plots. Also, movies allow you the ability to skip things and to move forward in time. When you have this need to want to explain, I find I’m over writing and over thinking everything. When I’m in the editing room, I know I can cut things out.

Instead of a back-story, I was happy to see Kate and Luke working together to help her move. It all builds to that scene when he really wants to go out with her afterwards but she wants to go out with the guys and that hurts him.

I think everybody has felt like that. You put yourself out there for somebody and there not giving it back in the way you hoped. But it’s complicated because she can’t be with him. He hasn’t made himself available in that way. I really emphasize with [Kate] in that scene. As selfish as she’s being, I also feel like he’s equally responsible for her reaction.

I wanted that quiet competitiveness. The sense of feeling each other out and staking out their territory. I’m interested in all of that. I spend a lot of my time thinking about the intricacies of relationships. How people are communicating or not communicating.

The other great scene in the film is the final shot. Nothing is said, but it spoke volumes.

That was fun to do. We played around with a couple different versions of that scene and I told them not to talk. It really came alive.

Note: This is a seattlepi.com reader blog. It is not written or edited by the P-I. The authors are solely responsible for content. E-mail us at newmedia@seattlepi.com if you consider a post inappropriate..